The Bucharest Court of Appeal dismissed as unfounded Cristina Trăilă’s appeal in the case she brought against journalist Mihai Goțiu and the Romanian Academic Society, publisher of România Curată. Informat.ro, 19 October: the court upheld the Bucharest Tribunal’s judgment. This is not a criminal conviction, and it is not, yet, a ruling with no further appeal.

The Tribunal had held, according to Presshub, that the articles complained of did not make untrue accusations, and that the value judgments had a factual basis. That is the civil reasoning, not our verdict on illegal logging. The Court of Appeal’s decision can still be challenged by recourse within 30 days of communication.

The case, Presshub writes, has run for more than two years and four months. Trăilă, a former PNL deputy, former secretary-general and deputy secretary-general in the Ciolacu and Bolojan governments, alleged defamation in pieces Goțiu published in late 2023 and early 2024, in Libertatea and România Curată.

The material concerned forest legislation in the period when she was both a deputy and a lawyer for Holzindustrie Schweighofer, later HS Timber. Goțiu wrote about a parliamentary interpellation, about the vote in the Legal Committee against setting up the environmental-crime directorate — “the forests’ DNA”, in the press — and about her lawyer’s income. That is what he wrote; the court judged whether the texts left the bounds of free expression, not whether HS Timber broke the timber law.

The action, Presshub / România Curată report, started when the new Forest Code reached the Legal Committee’s agenda. Andrei Ciurcanu had earlier published a recording from an event of the timber lobby group AIL Prolemn. Journalistic context, not a finding of ours.

HotNews headlined that she “loses definitively”. Informat.ro and Presshub keep the recourse open. We have not written final. A DNA file in Iași, mentioned by Informat.ro, is another thread: a criminal investigation, not today’s civil ruling.

Image: Bucharest Court of Appeal, 18 June 2011, Mister No, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons. The building, not a judgment.

Sources consulted: Cristina Trăilă a pierdut și apelul în procesul cu jurnalistul Mihai Goțiu și editorul platformei România Curată — Presshub; Cristina Trăilă a pierdut procesul în care acuza defăimarea în urma unor materiale publicate în Libertatea și România Curată — Informat.ro.